Abstract

This paper considers the photographic activity of Bernd and Hilla Becher as a form of detection, albeit one rather different from the traditions of the genre. Different, that is, from modernist concerns with questions of epistemology, with the struggle to understand the world and, ultimately, to solve it, and different, also, to postmodern concerns with the ontological uncertainty induced by the loss of such perspective. Here, I will propose that the Bechers’ typological work can instead be understood in terms of an ecological mode of detection, one that derives from a collapse of the anthropocentric opposition between ontology and epistemology, a collapse in which being and knowing are inseparably entangled.